The January issue of the Washington E-Bulletin highlights agencies’ progress on meeting the deadlines of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive. The first deadline required agencies to publish online in an open format at least three “high-value” datasets on Data.gov, the Federal government’s new raw-data portal.

The Government Relations Office is asking you to fill out our short survey on the usefulness of these new datasets to your work. We will share the results of the survey with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to inform them about which datasets are most valuable to legal researchers.

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Beginning next week, 2008 Public Access to Government Information (PAGI) Award winner OMB Watch will hold a series of Webcasts on open government featuring discussion with leading experts and time for questions from online audiences. The first in the series, “Policymaking for Open Government: An Assessment of the Obama Administration’s First-Year Progress,” will examine how the White House has followed through on President Obama’s pledge to make his Administration the most transparent and accountable in American history. Speakers will include:

Sarah Cohen, Duke University

Norm Eisen, the White House

Meredith Fuchs, National Security Archive

Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation (2009 PAGI Award winner)

Mark Tapscott, the Washington Examiner

The Webcast will be held on Thursday, January 28 at 3pm EST and you must register by January 25 to participate.

The next in the series, “The Obama Administration and Public Protections: A First-Year Regulatory Assessment,” will look at the regulatory record of the new Administration and the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Policy (OIRA). Speakers will include:

The Webcast will be held on Thursday, February 4 at 3 pm EST and registration ends February 1.

OMB Watch’s Webcasts will offer an exciting opportunity to hear thoughtful analysis from policymakers and experts and contribute to the dialogue on open government. The archived events will be available on OMB Watch’s Webcast Headquarters.

On December 23, AALL and SNELLA sent joint letters to Connecticut’s Governor Rell and to the leadership of the Appropriations Committee strongly opposing the decision to close the law libraries. Judge Quinn, Chief Court Administrator, explained in testimony before the Appropriations Committee that the closures had become necessary because the Executive Branch cut $12.9 million from the budget for the Judicial Branch.

AALL and SNELLA are sponsoring online petitions to save the courthouse libraries in Bridgeport,Hartford,Litchfield,Milford and Norwich. The sixth library, at the Willimantic Courthouse, is unstaffed and its small collection will likely be moved to the local public university.

The closures of Connecticut’s courthouse libraries will prevent attorneys, judges and members of the public from accessing the up-to-date legal information they need. It will also place a heavy burden on pro se litigants, who may not be able to get to another courthouse library if the one closest to home is closed. We need your help to demonstrate that there is broad support for keeping these libraries open.

If you live in Connecticut, please sign each one of these important petitions. If you’re not a Connecticut resident, please pass this message along to your friends, family and colleagues who live in the state.

Thank you in advance for spreading the word and helping to save Connecticut’s courthouse libraries!

On January 15, the EOP sent a letter to CREW and the Archive, describing the current system in use to capture, back-up and preserve its electronic records. The EMC Corporation’s Email Xtender (EX) system has several important features, including:

Automatic capture, in near real-time, of all email messages sent or received on the EOP’s unclassified network, including those sent to or from Blackberries;

A searchable online archive with access controls and audit reporting;

Systematic back-ups of the system on disaster recovery tapes; and

The ability to segregate emails and differentiate between Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act entities.

As noted by CREW and the Archive, the new system is a significant improvement over the one used by the Bush Administration, which lacked controls, reliable back-ups and advanced search capabilities. With its automatic back-ups, audits and controls against the unauthorized deletion of emails, the new system will preserve the Obama Administration’s emails and ensure against the disappearance of important electronic records.

[Posted by Emily Feldman]

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The First Annual World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) took place on January 12 here in Washington, D.C. in a free event produced by Public Knowledge. It included discussions with artists, documentary filmmakers, lawyers, activists and musicians interested in celebrating and supporting the concept of Fair Use for artistic and cultural expression. This was a unique way to hear about projects employing fair use topics from the people who created them. Examples of speakers include:

Irish artist Dan Walsh who created “Garfield Minus Garfield“, an almost existential reworking of the Garfield comic strip

Chris Burke, producer, This Spartan Life, which uses video content from video games like Halo for an entertaining talk show

Musician DJ Earworm who creates music mashups combining the top Billboard songs of the year, which also appear on his YouTube channel

In addition to talking to creators, the event highlighted legal and policy work in this area, such as the work of the Center for Social Media at American University and their efforts in various areas of best practices. At the lunch talk, Professors Peter Jaszi (American University) and Anthony Falzone (Stanford Center for Internet and Society) responded to audience questions surrounding fair use topics. Even in discussing failed defenses in a fair use case involving a Harry Potter Lexicon, Professor Jaszi sees positive developments. He called this a victory for fair use, saying that the federal court’s decision should help refine judicial tests for fair use factors, especially in the Second Circuit. For instance, he says that loss of licensing revenue is gone from the factor analysis here.

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken proactive steps to comply with the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive by issuing a federal register notice asking for public comment on the development of its new Open Government Plan. Specifically, the agency wants to know what data sets would be valuable for online publication and what transparency, public participation and collaboration improvements it should include in its Plan.

This call for comment demonstrates a significant shift in the agency’s thinking about public access. Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, AALL spoke out against the agency’s decision to shut down its Web site in order to review all publicly available material. We commend the NRC for changing its culture of secrecy and for committing itself to greater government transparency.

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In late October, the Law Library of Congress hosted the inaugural Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture on Jurisprudence with Guest Speaker Ronald Dworkin, Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law.